Spiders, Planets and a Boson: Wired Science’s Top Stories of the Year

This year, our list of most popular stories was dominated by 2012's most famous robot, a long-sought subatomic particle, 10 billion exoplanets and an amazing new spider species.

Above:

Watch Live: Last Transit of Venus of Your Lifetime

On June 5, a rare celestial event captivated our readers. Venus crossed across the face of the sun for the second and last time this century. We ran several live feeds of the event in our most popular post of the year. The next transit of Venus is not expected until 2117. If you missed this year's event, we have some great video and photos of the event.

Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered

Every year, at least one story about spiders creeps onto our top 10 list. Just over a week ago on Dec. 18, we broke the story on a possible new spider species that builds decoy spiders in its web, and it became a huge hit and landed at number two. This intriguing Peruvian spider crafts phony arachnids out of leaves, dead insects and other debris, and shakes them, apparently to make them look alive. Some of the decoys even have eight legs.

Physics Community Afire With Rumors of Higgs Boson Discovery

On June 20, rumors that the long-sought Higgs boson had finally, really been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider began to circulate through physics blogs two weeks before the official news (that a particle that looks just like the Higgs but that scientists still aren't willing to officially dub the Higgs) came out of CERN. Our readers love the LHC and the Higgs boson, and they proved it once again by pushing this post to number three on our list of most popular stories.

Video: Curiosity Rover’s View of the Harrowing Descent to Mars

On Aug. 6, NASA pulled off an incredible feat, landing its Curiosity rover safely on Mars through a series of incredible complex maneuvers including a contraption known as a sky crane. Our readers seem to love any news about Curiosity's adventures, but this video of the rover's white-knuckle thrill ride as it fell toward the surface was the favorite. Though this was the first video of the descent, a high-resolution version was released later, and then an even better video came out.

Curiosity Rover’s Secret Historic Breakthrough?

Speculation Centers on Organic Molecules
On Nov. 20, a comment made by the lead scientist on the Curiosity team to NPR about a historic finding on Mars led to a frenzy of speculation about what the rover may have found. NASA became very tight-lipped and said that nothing would be revealed before the American Geophysical Union conference two weeks later. So we talked to planetary scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory about what the discovery was likely to be. “If it’s going in the history books, organic material is what I expect,” he said. While the actual story turned out to be a little less exciting than Martians, the rover could still find evidence that there is or was life of some sort on Mars.

Curiosity Rover Finds Rock Type That’s Never Been Seen on Mars

Just about anything a robot does on another planet is awesome, but apparently finding a kind of rock that's never been seen on that planet before is one of the most awesome. On Oct. 11, NASA announced that after shooting a rock nicknamed Jake Matijevic with lasers and X-rays, Curiosity determined that it is of a variety that no other rover has ever spotted on Mars. Though previously unknown on Mars, the highly fractionated alkalic rock type is relatively well known to geologists because it is common in rift zones on Earth and island chains such as the Hawaiian Islands.

How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics

In the run-up to the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery, we wondered what finding the elusive particle would mean for physics. Turns out that what was going to be great for the Standard Model of physics, could be potentially disastrous for another well-loved theory: supersymmetry. The problem is that the Higgs isn't strange enough, and the LHC was failing to turn up any other evidence of supersymmetry.

Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase

If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short chapter in a long story, you'd say: Things are pretty wild right now. Our story on Nov. 29 looked at a different aspect of a well-reported study from Nature on the most massive study of genetic variation yet, that as a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution.

10 Billion Earth-Like Planets May Exist in Our Galaxy

Our readers love exoplanets, and one or more of them usually turns up in our top stories list. This year, 10 billion of them did. On Mar. 28, we reported that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars may have Earth-sized planets orbiting them that have the right conditions for life. This exciting prospect made this story a favorite.

Curiosity’s Latest High-Res Photo Looks Like Earth

To round out our top 10, why not another story sent to us from Mars by Curiosity? The fourth rover story on the list from Aug. 14 features a high-res image of the surface of the Red Planet that looks a lot like the Blue Planet, specifically desert scenes like those found in Nevada's Basin and Range or California's Death Valley.